While I do believe that credit card miles are the easiest and cheapest to acquire the fact remains that there are many people around the world who don’t have good deals on credit cards that earn miles. Australia does have a few deals going but playing the miles and points game here is mostly centered around buying cheap miles and redeeming them for premium class airfares at a huge discount. I don’t recommend buying miles on spec as the program could always devalue before you can spend them. Assuming I couldn’t get free miles from credit card sign up bonuses, I would wait until I was within 6 months of booking a trip before I would actually pay for miles, even at a discount.
The New Lifemiles Promo
The maximum you can acquire from this promo is 352,906 miles which will get you a few RT Star Alliance trips in business class. It would probably work out cheaper flying business class by this means than paying for economy tickets the normal way.
EXAMPLE – ROUND TRIP TO THE GALAPAGOS
This is one of the harder awards to get as I already said in my Lan post. There has been talk on Flyertalk that Avianca does occasionally have phantom award space on the United portal so I don’t consider United a reliable source for a Galapagos award.
Here’s the cost of using Lifemiles to go RT from Guayaquil to Baltra airport in the Galapagos.
10,000 miles per person on the outbound.
Please note that availability to/from SCY San Cristobal is much more difficult. This makes a difference to me since we are birding and not going on a cruise so chose this island as having the most land-based birds.
10,000 miles per person for the return flight from Baltra GPS.
You need 40,000 Lifemiles for 2 people to go RT from Guayaquil to the Galapagos. With the current promo, if you only buy the minimum to achieve the trip you are in the 4th tier which gets a 105% bonus. You still have to buy 20,000 miles to get at least 40,000 miles so you end up with 41,000 miles (I had 406 left over after my redemptions for next year so ignore those).
This ends up costing you $660 USD.
If you want to max out the promo, it will end up costing you $4950 for 352,500 miles.
So to determine if this is a good deal, lets look at our RT trip to the Galapagos for 2 people. When you buy miles, you still have to pay the taxes on top so you are only saving the cost of the base fare. In this case it’s $416 per person so $832 for both. You can save $172 if you use the Lifemiles promo to book these tickets. Before you buy the miles, you want to check the booking engine to make sure the award is available, especially if you don’t have much flexibility on dates. Personally, if I was ready to book right away and would otherwise have to pay cash, I’d be happy to save $172, otherwise I would hold off until I got closer to the booking window.
So this is basically the math you have to do before participating in these promos. They can be very useful in the right circumstances!
***Apologies for posting this after other bloggers beat me to it, we were out camping in the Aussie Outback!
